Fritzi Burger

Burger was born on 6 June 1910 in Vienna.^[1] Her family was Jewish.^[2]

Burger was the Austrian national champion from 1928 to 1931. She won the first-ever contested European Championships, held in 1930. Sonja Henie, who held a monopoly in women's figure skating at the time, was not present at this championship. She placed second behind Henie at the 1928 and 1932 Winter Olympics and earned bronze medals at the 1929 World Championships, behind Henie and Maribel Vinson of the U.S., and at the 1931 World Championships, behind Henie and Hilde Holovsky from Austria.^[3]

After the 1932 Olympics, Burger ended her skating career and went to London, where in 1935 she married Shinkichi Nishikawa, a grandson of the Japanese pearl tycoon Kōkichi Mikimoto.^[4] She returned with her husband to Vienna, where she gave birth to her son in the summer of 1937, just before the Anschluss (annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany). She, her husband and her son moved to London in 1938 and a few years later moved to Tokyo, Japan, where Mr. Nishikawa was from.

In the 1990s, living in the United States, Burger was interviewed for several documentaries on the history of figure skating. She joked in a 1994 interview, "I had two husbands. [Sonja Henie] even beat me at that. She had three."^[5] She died on 16 February 1999 in Bad Gastein, Austria.^[1]

• List of select Jewish figure skaters